Gender data was collected and processed in order to reveal gender inequalities. For example, the absolute value of the difference of boys and girls scores in educational tests is used. The data is then encoding in distinctive elements of a musical piece, such as distorted instruments or random patterns. Bigger inequalities are then perceived as strongly altered audio. Data points are presented in the screen as they are used in the musical piece.

Abstract Piece 2: “Women and time, freedom and math”
An audiovisual promenade, inspired by women’s history by Jacinta Torres and Claire Glanois (both Dr. in mathematics).

With the precious participation of Alice Guerlot-Kourouklis (music), E (violin), Marion Lenfant-Preus (voice), & Andreas (voice).
A timeline is split into four sections: Prelude, First wave, Second wave, Third wave. Each movement is “visually” illustrated by a female mathematician.
A log book will guide you through this journey: you will find some prime materials, facts, myths or quotes which “fed” this piece.https://www.youtube.com/embed/zKshtoPsqo4

Some notes on the sound landscape:
– The sound granulation, moving from unintelligible to distinct sentences, is intended to reflect the voice of women through history, and has been created from the quotes of or about women selected in the logbook.
– The piano is a rework (decomposed, recomposed) from compositions by Clara Schumann.-
Other source (apart from Live, Ableton) involves notably: Ms20, Theremine, guitar, CNN samples, French TV samples, Nasa samples, and violin by Emily Norton.

Some notes on the visual:
– The drawings were realised with Ink&Paper by Jacinta.
– The animations were realised with Processing and are echoes of some mathematics of these chosen women, such as the octonions, the billard tables, or the hyperbolic geometry. [This hyperbolic coral was highly inspired from Patrick Stein, Open processing.]
– The sentences displayed come from a Machine Learning algorithm (RNN, LSTM) fed with different texts about women. For coherency purposes, proof reading was required, and some permutation/transformation (automatic writing by Claire) was applied to the original text. Please be aware that these texts do not express our point of view on women’s issues.

You will find further portraits and interviews with mathematicians on the following websites:

14th General Meeting of EWM, hosted by the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, August 25-28, 2009. You will find videos with women mathematicians under (Part 1–3):